Branson Home Of Hillary's Deplorables. St John's College - Great Learning, Fairly Priced. Rest About Trump.

I received this from a very dear friend and fellow memo reader.

Branson is "deplorable" America and I urge everyone who has been tagged by Hillary and Barak to go there and enjoy being an American. Just do not take a ride in the "Duck Boats." (See 1 below.)
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This was sent to me by a dear friend and sometime fellow memo reader.

I served on the Board of Visitors of St John's College for 8 years and had both of the then two campus presidents speak for me when I began The JEA Speaker Series.  (See 2 below.)

And: https://freeingminds.sjc.edu/
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Obama lies about lying.  P & G would have been a good buy during his 8 year tenure but the economy was so bad soap was not even being purchased.(See 3 below.)

Meanwhile:

Trump's energy approach encourages  a huge potential deficit to be erased.

https://www.fool.com/amp/investing/2018/09/09/10-incredible-facts-about-american-lng-exports.aspx

Finally:

Our insane president was a charitable guy before entering politics. (See 3a and 3d below.)
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Dick
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1) Roy & Dale ...

Such a wonderful era to grow up!

THE END OF AN ERA

The young guns may not understand the meaning of this, but you should!

THE END OF AN ERA....... The Roy Rogers Museum in Branson , MO has closed its doors forever. The contents of the museum were sold at a public auction. Roy Rogers told his son, if the museum ever operates at a loss, close it, and sell the contents. He complied. Note the follow-on article truly the end of an era. Here is a partial listing of some of the items that were sold at auction.  Roy's 1964 Bonneville sold for $254,500. It was estimated to sell between 100 and 150 thousand dollars. His script book from the January 14,1953 episode of This Is Your Life sold for $10,000 (EST. $800-$1,000). A collection of signed baseballs (Pete Rose, Duke Snyder, and other greats) sold for $3,750. A collection of signed bats (Yogi Berra, Enos Slaughter, Bob Feller, and others) sold for $2,750. Trigger 's saddle and bridle sold for $386,500 (EST. 100-150 K). One of many of Roy 's shirts sold for $16,250 and one of his many cowboy hats sold for $17,500. One set of boot spurs sold for $10,625. (He never used a set of spurs on Trigger).

A life size shooting gallery sold for $27,500.

Various chandeliers sold from $6,875 to $20,000. Very unique and artistic in their western style. Roy's first Boots A signed photograph by Don Larsen taken during his perfect game in the world series against the Dodgers on Oct. 8, 1953, along with a signed baseball to Roy from Don, sold for $2,500. Two fabulous limited edition BB guns in their original boxes with Numerous photos of Roy , Dale, Gabby, and Pat sold for $3,750. A collection of memorabilia from his shows entertaining the troops in Vietnam sold for $938.  I never knew he was there. His flight jacket sold for $7,500. His set of dinnerware plates and silverware sold for $11,875. The Bible they used at the dinner table every night sold for $8,750. One of several of his guitars sold for $27,500. Nellybelle sold for $116,500. A fabulous painting of Roy , Dale, Pat, Buttermilk, Trigger, and Bullet sold for $10,625. One of several sets of movie posters sold for $18,750. A black and white photograph of Gene Autry with a touching inscription From Gene to Roy sold for $17,500. A Republic Productions Poster bearing many autographs of the people that played in Roy 's movies sold for $11,875. Dale's horse, Buttermilk (whose history is very interesting) sold below the pre - sale estimate for $25,000. (EST. 30-40 K). Bullet sold for $35,000 (EST. 10-15 K). He was their real pet. Dale's parade saddle, estimated to sell between 20-30 K, sold for $104,500. One of many pairs of Roy 's boots sold for$21,250. Trigger sold for $266,500. Do you remember the 1938 movie The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland?  Well, Olivia rode Trigger in that movie. Trigger was bred on a farm co-owned by Bing Crosby. Roy bought Trigger on a time payment plan for $2,500. Roy and Trigger made 188movies together. Trigger even outdid Bob Hope by winning an Oscar in the movie Son of Paleface in 1953. It is extremely sad to see this era lost forever. Despite the fact that Gene and Roy's movies, as well as those of other great characters, can be bought or rented for viewing, today's kids would rather spend their time playing video games. Today it takes a very special pair of parents to raise their kids with the right values and morals. These were the great heroes of our childhood, and they did teach us right from wrong, and how to have and show respect for each other and the animals that share this earth. You and I were born at the right time. We were able to grow up with these great people even if we never met them. In their own way they taught us patriotism and honor. We learned that lying and cheating were bad, and that sex wasn't as important as love. We learned how to suffer through disappointment and failure and work through it Our lives were drug free. So it's good-bye to Roy and Dale, Gene and Hoppy, the Lone Ranger, and Tonto. Farewell to Sky King and Superman and Sgt. Friday. Thanks to Capt. Kangaroo, Mr. Rogers, and Capt. Noah and all those people whose lives touched ours, and made them better. It was a great ride through childhood.

HAPPY TRAILS MY FRIENDS

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The Most Contrarian College in America

What’s the highest calling of higher education? St. John’s College has some enduring answers.

By Frank Bruni

Opinion Columnist

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Students discussing Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” in a seminar at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, N.M.CreditCreditAdria Malcolm for The New York Times

SANTA FE, N.M. — Have I got a college for you. For your first two years, your regimen includes ancient Greek. And I do mean Greek, the language, not Greece, the civilization, though you’ll also hang with Aristotle, Aeschylus, Thucydides and the rest of the gang. There’s no choice in the matter. There’s little choice, period.

Let your collegiate peers elsewhere design their own majors and frolic with Kerouac. For you it’s Kant. You have no major, only “the program,” an exploration of the Western canon that was implemented in 1937 and has barely changed.

It’s intense. Learning astronomy and math, you don’t merely encounter Copernicus’s conclusions. You pore over his actual words. You’re not simply introduced to the theory of relativity. You read “Relativity,” the book that Albert Einstein wrote.

Diversions are limited. There’s no swimming team. No pool. The dorms are functional; same goes for the dining. You’re not here for banh mi. You’re here for Baudelaire.

[Go beyond the headlines and behind the curtain with my candid reflections on politics, culture, higher education and more every week. Sign up for my newsletter.]

I’m talking about St. John’s College, which was founded in 1696 in Annapolis, Md., is the third-oldest college in America and, between its campus there and the one here, has about 775 undergraduates. And I’m drawing attention to it because it’s an increasingly exotic and important holdout against so many developments in higher education — the stress on vocational training, the treatment of students as fickle consumers, the elevation of individualism over a shared heritage — that have gone too far. It’s a necessary tug back in the other direction.

I’m not saying that most students would take to it or that other schools should mimic it. The degree to which “the program” omits the intellectual contributions of women and people of color troubles me. But many schools would be wise to consider and better integrate its philosophy, which Walter Sterling, the dean of the Santa Fe campus, recently explained to me.

“Your work and career are a part of your life,” he said when I met with him and the Santa Fe president, Mark Roosevelt. “Education should prepare you for all of your life. It should make you a more thoughtful, reflective, self-possessed and authentic citizen, lover, partner, parent and member of the global economy.” I love that assessment — the precision, balance and sweep of it.

And what better idiom for the instruction that he’s describing than the classics? What better mooring? They're the foundation of so many of America’s ideals and institutions. They’re the through line from yesterday to tomorrow.

I visited St. John’s out of respect for its orneriness and because it’s making an announcement this week that’s consistent with its mission of pushing back against the fashionable norm. For the academic year that begins in the fall of 2019, it’s lowering its yearly tuition to $35,000 from $52,000, a change that recognizes how wildly the cost of college has risen and how few students pay the sticker price anyway.

Some colleges keep that figure high, even if it scares away a few prospects, partly because it validates their prestige. Then they dole out deals, often regardless of need. It’s a capricious, confusing and demoralizing process.

“We’ve resisted almost every trend in higher education that we consider naughty,” Roosevelt told me, but they surrendered to what he called "prestige pricing" — until now.

St. John’s wants more comers than it gets; this price cut may help. But the college also means to be a model of financial accessibility as well as of rigorous intellectualism. To stay flush, it’s conducting a major fund-raising campaign, begun without any announcement two years ago, to raise $300 million by 2023. An alumnus, Warren Winiarski, the founder of the Stag’s Leap winery, has agreed to match up to $50 million of contributions.

The St. John’s method isn’t cheap. No class is larger than 20 students; even so, some have two “tutors,” which is what professors are called. They steer winding, soulful discussions that demand engagement. I eavesdropped on several. Three dynamics stood out.

The first was how articulate the students were. Something wonderful happens when you read this ambitiously and wallow in this many words. You become agile with them.

The second was the students’ focus. A group discussing Homer’s “Iliad” spent more than 10 minutes on the phrase — the idea — of someone having his “fill of weeping.” If digital devices and social media yank people from one trumpet blast to the next, St. John’s trains them to hold a note — to caress it, pull at it, see what it can withstand and what it’s worth.

The third dynamic was their humility. They weren’t wedded to their initial opinions. They weren’t allowed to be. And they moved not toward the best answer but toward better questions. In the “Iliad” and in life, is there any catharsis in revenge? Any resolution in death? Does grief end or just pause? Do wars?

Jack Isenberg, a senior, told me that St. John’s had taught him how much is unknowable. “We have to be comfortable in ambiguity,” he said.

What a gift. What an education.

Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs — including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic — before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books.  

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3) Sorry Obama, But It's Trump's

 Economic Boom, Not Yours

Growth: Barack Obama is on the road attempting to claim credit for the booming economy under President Trump. But the only thing Obama deserves credit for is making it easy for Trump to undo Obama's anti-growth policies.

Let's see if we have this right.

For eight years, President Obama presided over the worst economic recovery in modern times. For six years, he blamed Republicans in Congress for thwarting his spending agenda and hampering growth. In his last two years in office, he claimed that 2% growth was the best we could hope for. And in his last year in office, while the economy was again stalling out, Obama claimed that Trump's tax cuts and deregulation would only make things worse.

But now that we're in the midst of a booming economy — which kicked in after Trump reversed almost all Obama's economic policies — we're supposed to believe that it's Obama who deserves all the credit.

Yep. That's precisely what Obama and his Amen Chorus in the press want us to believe.

In his speech in Illinois last Friday, Obama complained that Republicans were taking credit for his work.

"When you hear how great the economy's doing right now, let's just remember when this recovery started," he said. "I mean, I'm glad it's continued, but … suddenly Republicans are saying it's a miracle."

This week, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett wisely set the record straight. At a briefing on Monday, he noted that just about every important economic indicator showed the economy was stalling out in Obama's last year.

Hassett explained that small business optimism had been on the decline before the November 2016 election. The percentage of businesses saying it's a good time to expand was, too. Business investment was stagnant. All those turned upward starting in 2017. Applications for new businesses are now well above the trend over Obama's entire second term, Hassett noted. And blue-collar jobs are growing faster than any time since the Reagan administration.

Turnaround on GDP Growth

There's more. The rate of GDP growth was decelerating in Obama's last year. It went from 2.3% in Q2, to 1.9% in Q3 to 1.8% in Q4 of 2016. Under Trump, GDP growth has averaged 2.9%. It was 4.2% last quarter and might be higher in the current one.

The stock market also was stuck in neutral the year before the November 2016 elections. The Dow is up by some 45% since then.

Real median family income didn't budge from August 2015 to November 2016, according to Sentier Research. It's up more than 4% since Trump came into office. Wages are on the upswing.

In Obama's last year, unemployment rate remained basically unchanged — it was 4.9% in Jan 2016, and 4.8% when Trump took office in Jan. 2017. Now it's down to 3.9%

We could go on.

Meanwhile, the same reporters now patting Obama on the back for today's strong economy were reporting in late 2016 about how — as The New York Times put it — "the underlying reality of low growth will haunt whoever wins the White House."

Scientific Consensus

Still not convinced Trump deserves credit for the current booming economy? Consider that a survey of 68 business, financial and academic economists by The Wall Street Journal at the start of this year found that most believed Trump's policies would boost the economy, while the same group had said Obama's policies were a drag on long-term growth. Ninety percent said Trump's tax cuts would accelerate growth.

It is what the left would, in another context, call a "scientific consensus."

Yet to listen to liberal activists and the ideological press and you'd think that Trump was crazy for claiming credit for today's growth. "The economic expansion we're enjoying today was set in motion under Obama," insists Slate's Jordan Weissmann.

Doesn't this make people like Obama and Weissmann "economy deniers?"


3a)Trump: The Untold Story . . .

Liz Crokin is an award-winning author, a seasoned journalist and an advocate for sex crime victims. Liz began her journey at the University of Iowa where she received a bachelor's in journalism and political science.

Trump Does The Unthinkable

by Liz Crokin

As an entertainment journalist, I've had the opportunity to cover Trump for over a decade, and in all my years covering him I've never heard anything negative about the man until he announced he was running for president. Keep in mind, I got paid a lot of money to dig up dirt on celebrities like Trump for a living so a scandalous story on the famous billionaire could've potentially sold a lot of magazines and would've been a Huge feather in my cap.

 Instead, I found that he doesn't drink alcohol or do drugs, he's a hardworking businessman.  On top of that, he's one of the most generous celebrities in the world with a heart filled with more gold than his $100 million New York penthouse.
 Since the media has failed so miserably at reporting the truth about Trump, I decided to put together some of the acts of kindness he's committed over three decades which has gone virtually unnoticed or fallen on deaf ears.
 In 1986, Trump prevented the foreclosure of Annabell Hill's family farm after her husband committed suicide. Trump personally phoned down to the auction to stop the sale of her home and offered the widow money. Trump decided to take action after he saw Hill's pleas for help in news reports.

In 1988, a commercial airline refused to fly Andrew Ten, a sick Orthodox Jewish child with a rare illness, across the country to get medical care because he had to travel with an elaborate life-support system. His grief stricken parents contacted Trump for help and he didn't hesitate to send his own plane to take the child from Los Angeles to New York so he could get his treatment.

 In 1991, 200 Marines who served in Operation Desert Storm spent time at Camp Lejune in North Carolina before they were scheduled to return home to their families. However, the Marines were told that a mistake had been made and an aircraft would not be able to take them home on their scheduled departure date. When Trump got wind of this, he sent his plane to make two trips from North Carolina to Miami to safely return the Gulf War Marines to their loved ones.

In 1995, a motorist stopped to help Trump after the limo he was traveling in got a flat tire. Trump asked the Good Samaritan how he could repay him for his help. All the man asked for was a bouquet of flowers for his wife. A few weeks later Trump sent the flowers with a note that read: We've paid off your mortgage.

 In 1996, Trump filed a lawsuit against the city of Palm Beach, Florida, accusing the town of discriminating against his Mar-a-Lago resort club because it allowed Jews and blacks. Abraham Foxman, who was the Anti-Defamation League Director at the time, said Trump put the light on Palm Beach not on the beauty and the glitter, but on its seamier side of discrimination. Foxman also noted that Trump's charge had a trickle-down effect because other clubs followed his lead and began admitting Jews and blacks.

In 2000, Maury Povich featured a little girl named Megan who struggled with Brittle Bone Disease on his show and Trump happened to be watching. Trump said the little girl's story and positive attitude touched his heart. So he contacted Maury and gifted the little girl and her family with a very generous check.

 In 2008, after Jennifer Hudson's family members were tragically murdered in Chicago, Trump put the Oscar-winning actress and her family up at his Windy City hotel for free. In addition to that, Trump's security took extra measures to ensure Hudson and her family members were safe during such a difficult time.

 In 2013, New York bus driver Darnell Barton spotted a woman close to the edge of a bridge staring at traffic below as he drove by. He stopped the bus, got out and put his arm around the woman and saved her life by convincing her to not jump. When Trump heard about this story, he sent the hero bus driver a check simply because he believed his good deed deserved to be rewarded. 

In 2014, Trump gave $25,000 to Sgt. Andrew Tamoressi after he spent seven months in a Mexican jail for accidentally crossing the US-Mexico border. President Barack Obama couldn't even be bothered to make one phone call to assist with the United States Marine's release; however, Trump opened his pocketbook to help this serviceman get back on his feet.

In 2016, Melissa Consin Young attended a Trump rally and tearfully thanked Trump for changing her life. She said she proudly stood on stage with Trump as Miss Wisconsin USA in 2005. However, years later she found herself struggling with an incurable illness and during her darkest days she explained that she received a handwritten letter from Trump telling her she's the bravest woman, I know. She said the opportunities that she got from Trump and his organizations ultimately provided her Mexican-American son with a full-ride to college

Lynne Patton, a black female executive for the Trump Organization, released a statement in 2016 defending her boss against accusations that he's a racist and a bigot. She tearfully revealed how she's struggled with substance abuse and addiction for years. Instead of kicking her to the curb, she said the Trump Organization and his entire family loyally stood by her through immensely difficult times.

 Donald Trump's kindness knows no bounds and his generosity has and continues to touch the lives of people from every sex, race and religion. When Trump sees someone in need, he wants to help.

Two decades ago, Oprah asked Trump in a TV interview if he'd ever run for president. He said:  "If it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally because I really am tired of seeing what's happening with this country.'"

 That day finally came.  Trump saw America in need and he wanted to help. How unthinkable!  On the other hand. have you ever heard of Hillary or Obama ever doing such things with their own resources?

 Now that's really unthinkable! Might be worth passing on!!! 

Just shows we hired the right guy. If Hollywood, the liberals and the media ever STOP harassing him, Trump will have time to do many more positive things for our country....the good ole United States of America!! 

P. S. To those who are already Fact Checking, don't bother......already did it, and all the stories are TRUE! 

3d)  Is Chaos an Impeachable Offense?

Trump is destabilizing the status quo, as he promised to do. The keepers of the status quo cry foul.
ByVictor Davis Hanson

Until 2017, there were certain political assumptions that most people no longer really believed but also preferred not to question — given the likely animus from the so-called bipartisan establishment, a naked entity which, by convention, we all agreed was splendidly clothed.

China could freely cheat on trade, and the U.S. could take the commercial hit, because one day its misbegotten riches would force liberalization and thereby make China a member in good standing of the family of democratic nations. After 40 years, we are still waiting on the promised democratic transformation — at great cost to the industrial and manufacturing heartland of the United States.

NATO member nations always would promise, indeed swear, that they would meet their military spending commitments, even as they had no intention at all of doing so. Fine, we shrugged, since World War II it has been the duty of the United States to lead and protect the West. What other nation had America’s inexhaustible wealth and power to subsidize rich socialist democracies, and commensurate unconcern with its own insidiously hollowed-out industrial interior? Accordingly, American presidents would lecture NATO nations about their promised obligations and meanwhile expect public nods and private snickers. In the New York and Washington corridor, the gospel was never to question the changing role or funding of NATO but always to utter “NATO is the linchpin of the West.” End of discussion.

The Palestinians will always remain “refugees” in a way that similar contemporaneously displaced people who were also forced out of their homeland — Prussians, Jews of the Middle East, or Volga Germans — no longer have refugee status, after more than 70 years. A chaotic Trump recently accepted reality and quit funding the United Nations relief organization that supposedly attends to “refugees” who in reality are a political construct deemed useful for demonizing Israel around the world.

Jerusalem has long been privately accepted as both the historic and natural capital of Israel, and it’s now far more open and freer than it was prior to 1967. But we were not supposed to say that given fears of Palestinian pique, or terrorist attacks, or inflaming the Middle East. Trump in his supposedly reckless fashion simply moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, and other nations strangely are beginning to follow.

No one really believed that the Iran deal would stop Iranian nuclear proliferation, or even prune back Iran-backed terrorism. The deal’s asymmetrical nocturnal ransom-for-hostages payments, its myriad exceptions to spot inspections, and its inability to check ballistic-missile construction were all ignored. The fallback excuse for the deal was that it would take a little longer for Iran to gain nuclear weapons, and would make Iran a little nicer to the United States. Yet few even believed those yarns. And no one had been willing to invoke a crisis with Iran by saying so. So we shrugged that the Iran deal was bad, but it was at least our bad deal — and then Trump dashed our illusions.

Serious people assumed that the Paris climate accord was even more ridiculous than the Kyoto protocol — grandstanding without any real collective enforcement effort to address “climate change.” All agreed that the vast production and utilization of natural gas de facto made America the most effective major nation in reducing carbon emissions, far more effective than supposedly greener Europe. The elite assumed as well that the Paris deal was a blueprint for expropriating Western wealth and redistributing it to the non-West. All publicly praised it; none privately liked it. And now it’s gone with a whimper, not a bang.

Blocking the construction of the Keystone pipeline and the opening of the ANWAR oil fields to energy development had become iconic #Resistance causes. We knew the pipeline would streamline energy transference and likely take the burden off more dangerous rail and truck transportation, and that ANWAR would help to achieve U.S. energy independence or at least increase national wealth. So now both are under construction and development. The nation yawns its assent.

Even the proponents of open borders — Democratic strategists, Latino activists, corporate employers, the Mexican government — privately concede that without a border there is no nation, that walls work (as fences and walls do around their own yards), and that they would not wish to conduct their own lives on the principles of picking and choosing which laws to follow.

We also assumed that liberal grandees do not put their children in schools with large numbers of non-English speakers. Employers know that identity theft and fake social-security numbers are a national epidemic. Realists accept that without massive and illegal influxes of new foreign nationals, assimilation and integration of legal immigrants would eventually put the vested illegal-immigration interests out of business, in the sense that there are no longer German, Scandinavian, or Japanese ethnic czars.

Mexico knew that under the guise of “caring,” it exported human capital and exploited its own, on the theory that Mexican expatriates’ standard of living, often subsidized by American local and state welfare programs, would take a hit by collectively sending $30 million back home in remittances. Then the bull Trump supposedly tore apart the carefully arranged immigration China shop.

The list of status quo absurdities is nearly limitless, from the politically biased monopolies of Silicon Valley high-tech public utilities that are mysteriously exempt from all oversight (including product-liability laws and anti-trust legislation) to the idea that it is apparently either normal or inexplicable that nearly 8,000 African-American youth are murdered each year, but no one knows how to stop, or even dare try to stop, the carnage.

Again, the stance toward all these paradoxes was that it was more of a problem to tell the truth, address reality, and make the necessary difficult adjustments than to shrug, continue on, and maintain the façade of normality. Then a president came along with no prior investment in the economic and foreign-policy establishment, and apparently no desire to create any, or to worry much about his own ignorance of past conventional wisdom. And so in breakneck speed he began cancelling deals, renegotiating asymmetrical agreements, and questioning protocols of decades past — and he did so without adopting the comportment of past presidents and the advice of either the administrative state or the Washington political-media establishment.

The ensuing reaction was that the Trump medicine was said to be worse than the preexisting disease, although no one could really explain why that was so.

So we are left only with “Trump did it,” and therefore he should be impeached, declared insane, sued, forced to resign, or face an intervention from “loyal” patriot aides because of his impulsiveness and lack of “first principles” that had given us the above status quo. Even the recent anonymous New York Times op-ed author offered no real explanations of what exactly Trump has done wrong that would warrant anti-democratic removal other than to concede that Trump has done things that most felt were long overdue. And he made changes in a rude and uncouth manner that the establishment did not like — just as a nude emperor in invisible clothes does not like it when an outsider observes that he is naked.

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Ima